Mark Jenkins
Mark Jenkins reviews movies for NPR.org, as well as for , which covers the Washington, D.C., film scene with an emphasis on art, foreign and repertory cinema.
Jenkins spent most of his career in the industry once known as newspapers, working as an editor, writer, art director, graphic artist and circulation director, among other things, for various papers that are now dead or close to it.
He covers popular and semi-popular music for The Washington Post, Blurt, Time Out New York, and the newsmagazine show Metro Connection, which airs on member station -FM.
Jenkins is co-author, with Mark Andersen, of Dance of Days: Two Decades of Punk in the Nation's Capital. At one time or another, he has written about music for Rolling Stone, Slate, and NPR's All Things Considered, among other outlets.
He has also written about architecture and urbanism for various publications, and is a writer and consulting editor for the Time Out travel guide to Washington. He lives in Washington.
-
In this loose, grisly adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft story, a family undergoes a series of mutations while Nicolas Cage gets increasingly unhinged; the result is "a gory mess."
-
Both didactic and engrossing, director Scott Z. Burns' film about the investigation into post-9/11 CIA interrogation techniques stars Adam Driver as an idealistic Senate staffer.
-
Cynthia Erivo is quite good, and the story of Harriet Tubman is a tale worth telling, but as presented here it's earnest, conventional and "fundamentally inert."
-
The slaying of Laquan McDonald by a Chicago cop has been widely reported but Richard Rowley's documentary lays out the CPD's cover-up, and its ultimate collapse, in stark detail.
-
Writer-director Jia Zhangke returns to many of his classic themes, actors and locations — this time with a new, slightly absurdist touch to reflect China's profound transformation.
-
A French dance troupe drinks sangria spiked with LSD and descends into carnal violence in a film that turns into "just another Noé freakout, familiar in tone and stylistic tics."
-
A mix of dramatization and recorded interviews with Jews who managed to hide in plain sight in Berlin despite the Nazi dragnet, this hybrid film fights against itself.
-
In this stirring documentary, the secret archive maintained by members of the Warsaw Ghetto comes to vivid life through historical footage and reenactments.
-
Pawel Pawlikowski follows up 2013's Idawith this tale of Polish musicians living under Stalin; it's "an ode to joylessness that feels historically credible but narratively arbitrary."
-
Peter Farrelly's tale of a black musician chauffeured through the Deep South of the 1960s by a white driver is "a well-meaning but glib and shallow ode to interracial healing."